Growth in color management has resulted in an increase in software packages that are used to generate International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles. ICC profiles describe color attributes of a particular device or viewing requirement by defining a mapping between a source or target color space and a Profile Connection Space (PCS), such as either CIELAB (L*a*b*) or CIEXYZ.
Offset print customers often use custom blended inks for their printing instead of ICC-based digital printing. Moving these customers to an ICC-based digital printing solution is difficult because of the mapping required for their custom inks. If these custom inks have no standard input color space, then mapping to the ICC PCS is difficult. Often times a device CMYK path is the only option. However, this can come at the cost of color accuracy. For example, it may be possible to find the device CMYK match for a given solid (100% coverage). However, this relationship between CMYK % might not hold true for lighter tone levels of the custom ink causing incorrect colors in the resultant output.
Therefore, what is desired is a color management workflow for effectively mapping custom blended inks from offset printing to the ICC PCS for use in ICC-based digital printing.